Spectrum: Autism Research News

A team of researchers is trialing a fast approach to autism drug development: simultaneously testing candidates in people and in mice.

Stimulating the vagus nerve may normalize the brain response to sound in a rat model of Rett syndrome. It may also improve rats’ behavioral response to certain speech sounds.

Mice with an autism-linked deletion in chromosome 16 show abnormalities in their blood vessels and circulation.

An autonomous robotic ‘rat’ may offer novel insights into the social responses of its warm-blooded counterparts.

New and improved autism screens and diagnostic tools promise to streamline the long path to an autism diagnosis.

The pattern of high-pitched calls a mouse makes may reflect how, and how much, it is interacting with other mice. The pattern holds for typical mice as well as for two mouse models of autism.

Scientists used the gene-editing tool CRISPR to create two marmosets lacking MECP2, the gene mutated in Rett syndrome.

People with autism have more gray matter — or neuronal matter — in their brains overall than their typical peers do.

Targeting a fluorescent protein to the cell bodies of neurons enables researchers to clearly see which neurons fire when.

Women whose children are severely autistic have lower serotonin levels than do those whose children have mild or moderate autism traits.